'Design was a lucky break for a shy, small-town boy like me'
'Design was a lucky break for a shy, small-town boy like me'
By Priyanka Nair
Partho Guha, Founder Director, Head - Innovation and Strategy at Elephant takes us through his artistic journey and shares his insights on how to keep a perfect balance of logic and intuition in design:
Why art?
As a child, drawing on the floor and walls with colored chalks was great fun. Possibly because my parents had a high tolerance level. I was not particularly winning awards for my creative pieces then but that never discouraged me. Drawing was more like getting into a secret world that you are most happy spending time in.
Why did you choose to be in Design?
Design to me happened by accident. I was totally confused about what is that I wanted to become. The fear of becoming anything predictable like a doctor, engineer, army officer, bank clerk or even a government employee made me stay away from those options.
I was instead attempting entrance tests for all obscure unheard of courses. The entrance exam to NID was one such attempt. The test itself was great fun and it seemed joyfully fresh. Especially at a time when nobody knew what exactly you will end up doing after you pass out as a designer. Design was a lucky break for a middle class small town, shy boy like me.
Your thoughts on, the conflict between 'regular' work and the more artistically satisfying work
Design is a mix of logic and intuition. There are some projects, where intuition is dominant making them artistically demanding. The intuition can be expressed through a 'visual' or multiple 'thoughts' depending on the context of the project. But a great solution happens when logic and intuition fit each other perfectly. If one listens carefully, one can hear the click of a perfect fit: that's real satisfaction.
How often do you get to do something that challenges you as an artist?
To be artistic is an attitude, a way of approaching projects or even life. It involves going beyond what your logical mind tells you and listening to your inner intuitive whispers. Believing in those soft feelings and taking hard decisions based on them. Sometime the whispers get expressed through paintings but that's just a little part. In that sense, almost everyday there is a situation where you are responding intuitively. Actually if one makes purely artistic decisions, the day becomes cheerful and at night one gets the best sleep.
Which artists inspire you the most?
The design masters like Paul Rand, Saul Bass are definitely an inspiration on balancing design with art. A painter like Paul Klee is an inspiration on how art can also learn from design.
Is there any difference in creating art or design, considering both are creative in nature?
Personally the approach to work and painting differs by 180 degree. While approaching design, one starts with logic, market, production and the intuition comes later to define the context. It is driven by the mind with some help from the heart.
While doing a painting my concern is to keep logic away so that the inner whisper can flow free and uninhibited. Looking for meaning only gets in the way; it destroys the purity of intuition. The more one paints, the intuition gains power and is expressed strongly. In my process of painting, it is all about heart, where mind is not allowed. The outcome of art is that immense peace and joy. That is the only motivation. 'Design was a lucky break for a shy, small-town boy like me'
[Partho's Art Gallery: Work done for MBT (1,2), Bilcare (3), TCS (4) and Elephant (5)]
Do you try to add to the art quotient in whatever it is that you do?
I do not consciously mix it in. The work has its role and context and art has its own, and to me they are very different. But, deep down I am one person and within a design work the art flows in a subtle way. This mixing happens in a complex manner. And one knows that when you enjoy your work.
What is the scope for an artist in a world going digital?
The real art lies within the artist, media only helps in expression. Historically art has evolved through various media, from cave painting, oil, charcoal, spray and the properties of the media has affected the final outcome. Digital is one such media and it has its strengths and weakness. It is for the artist to use them so that the expression stays pure.
(This story is a part of our series that features some of the real art talents of Indian advertising)
Elephant Hosts tDAA Asia Meets @ Pune
In 2002, Elephant was invited to be part of The Design Alliance Asia, a consortium of design companies across 13 Asian countries that include Mainland China . Hong Kong . India . Indonesia . Laos . Lebanon / Middle East. Philippines . Singapore . South Korea . Taiwan . Thailand . Vietnam.
It is a not-for-profit alliance founded by William Harald Wong, a renowned designer from Malaysia with a focus on cultural research & insights projects for multinationals or governments. Every year, one of the associate countries hosts the annual meet of associates & affiliates to discuss the upcoming opportunities and share regional insights.
To mark 25 years of Elephant, the meet is being hosted at Pune this year between 16-17-18 Oct. About 25 well known designers from around Asia are with us for this.
Check profiles of designers on http://www.tdaasia.com
Design + Culture
"Maybe we should question if we have isolated some of the cultural finess towards objects, buildings & spaces in our effort to survive post-colonial growth period" - Ashish Deshpande | Creative Brands | Sept 2014 issue
http://issuu.com/creativebrandsmagazine/docs/creative_brands-india_edition-sep-2/c/sl7e1y2
Around the Palm Beach Café
We have been immensely busy, doing very diverse set of engagements, exploring the length & breadth of what design thinking can do, and enjoying many high points. Here is what has happened at Elephant in the last 2/3 of years: It is a long note, but I think you may enjoy going through it.
Big deal: Elephant completed 25 years this May; the only independent multi-disciplinary design agency to reach this milestone in India. We are rather proud of this achievement considering we started & grew in Pune, which is not a main-stream business or media hub. We believe Elephant pioneered “business of design” in India. We have stayed profitable in the entire journey, though initially, for at least a decade, we had to painstakingly explain & prove the power of design-led thinking to Indian businesses. Elephant has also been a launch-pad for many of its former interns & employees who are now successful design entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs in various corporates.
Growth: through work across India, SE Asia, Africa& Europe leading to deeper understanding of global trends and consumers. Overall, the focus has grown from delivering design projects to partnering with clients for design thinking & strategy for a sustainable success. As of today, Elephant is 80+ team with largest number being at Pune, its centre of excellence. Delhi team celebrated 6 years, with 25 people. Team recently moved to Cyber City at Gurgaon in a swanky place, closer to many clients. Singapore team, now in its 3rd year has grown too and remains housed at a plush business complex off Orchard Road. Elephant’s relevant experience in design-led innovation found great traction in SE Asia with clients from diverse domains including hospitality, spa, beauty products, art, education etc. An Elephant outpost near Bonn in Germany has been activated recently and it also won couple of strategic projects in the consumer goods domain for brands looking to enter emerging markets. This outpost may soon become a full fledged office.
Elephant Culture: When you always want to do the new, and discard repetitive, templatised solutions, the challenge is to the keep teams consistently curious & engaged. We celebrate every festival, encourage multi-cultural ethos, have our own band, Elephant Premier League cricket internal tournament, celebrate Fruit Day on 10th of every month, make eco-friendly Ganesh idols, have our own café called Palm Beach. We welcome interns from USA, Turkey, Singapore, Germany, France & most frequently, The Netherlands. We strongly believe that we are unparalleled in keeping a vibrant culture alive at work among our fraternity. We have Monday Morning Meetings as a ritual at Elephant where we come up with a new group engagement every single week. This helps us keep a positive mindset despite trying deadlines to solve wicked problems.
Top work in 2/3 of years:
Brand: Last 2 years got us 2 ReBrand 100 (USA) awards, CII Design Excellence & Designomics for CI Programmes. Daimler chose Elephant, a first ever design partner outside Germany to design their brand. Elephant team designed the Bharat Benz identity for Daimler trucks. The brand was cast keeping the legacy as well as cultural alignments in mind. Praj, a B2B engineering giant invited Elephant for rebranding. Talking about long term relationships, Elephant had also worked on the original Praj branding in 1996, which was up for change due to newer ambition & global growth. The new brand was launched in 2014. We facilitated an ‘integration through branding” exercise for a group of 10 companies led by Bhogales from Marathwada region. The group is now called AITG, that stands for Applied Innovation & Technology Group. We also rebranded another very ambitious engineering company called GrindMaster last year.
Elephant has been the design partner for Champion’s League T20 for three consecutive cricket seasons including one in South Africa for creating brand livery for communication & venues. The most happening IPL cricket team, KKR invited Elephant to design the stadia livery for last season of IPL.
FMCG Brands: Hector Beverages partnered with Elephant for naming, visual identity & packaging for a range of ethnic drinks. Paper Boat is considered the most successful beverage brand launch of the decade (the last successful one was Appy in mid-eighties, which later launched Fizz). Other very successful packaging launches include Good Knight Fast Card, Good Knight xpress system, Hit Anti-roach gel, Lacto Calamine rebranded range, V wash, Britannia Tiger, Marie Gold, NutriChoice, Cakes, Devaaya rice & staples, Colgate Visible White, Eraser skincare, Tzinga beverage, Kara skincare wipes, Kyron Brandy, Jolly Roger Rum, Venky’s sports nutrition, Heinz MaPlan, Galaxy & Snickers Festive packs, Haldiram’s Festive packs, rebranded Chandrika, rebranded Glucovita & many more. Elephant was also invited to work on two international brands from Godrej portfolio; Stella, a homecare brand in Indonesia & a hair brand across 5 countries in Africa. The former has had a very successful launch, the later is almost ready to go to market. We can easily claim to be in any Indian shopping basket through at least one brand designed by us.
We published insights & trends around “new woman” on International Women’s Day this year. They can be read at http://issuu.com/ashwinielephant/docs/elephant_trendswatch_2014.
Product Design: In our 25th year of design partnership with Symphony, the team designed two highly successful air-cooler ranges Diet & Storm. Symphony is world’s largest air-cooler brand with reach in 30 countries. Elephant has designed their products since 1989. We also continued to design range of products for India’s leading cookware brand, Nirlep, another very long & strong design partnership.
Other work includes a global award winning milk chiller for Promethean Power Systems. This project was a partnership to achieve solution for rural milk-collection eco-system that faces huge challenges due to inconsistent power supply. Most exciting moment for this team was to get invited by BCCI to design an exclusive memento that was presented to Sachin Tendulkar on his last outing.
Retail: Two consecutive VMRD awards for best retail design for QSR chains Venky’s Xprs & KrustysBistro. Our long time partnership with Axis Bank was instrumental in getting them CMO Asia Award for Impactful Retail & Merchandising Programme. Branded experience design work also includes Suzlon Global Campus, Eon Campus etc.
Digital: Elephant has been involved in creating highly engaging digital experiences. As part of our long association with Delhi Duty Free Stores, Vir Sanghvi was signed on as India’s first Facebook editor for the brand. His deft inputs on Facebook and his engagement on luxury brands with bloggers and the DDFS team added an important dimension to the communication. When every TV channel went hoarse with their analysis on Lok Sabha election results, we launched itsmytake.com, a website for user generated infographics to express opinions on events of interest. This was a self initiated platform brought to life with IT giant Persistent Systems and Sakal media group as partners. We will be exploring immense potential of this platform in the near future through various participatory triggers.
Social Impact: Elephant contributed to a global award winning social impact project with a couple of workshops and visually appealing and cost effective packaging for the laddoos once the recipes were finalized. The Laddoo Project is aimed to provide nutrition to under-privileged children and was executed by DeepaGriha NGO with support from Design Impact USA. Elephant has been chosen as a design partner by Delivering Change Foundation that is working towards “Draught Free Maharashtra by 2019”. The same team also partnered with Elephant for “Pune Bus Day” which was a huge success in November 2012.
Elephant was invited by HK Government to be part of “Colours of Asia”, research project that culminated into an exhibition, seminars & book that was edited by me, with contribution from design experts across 13 Asian countries.
For the Design Fraternity: Apart from speaking & jury engagements including ICOGRADA Design Week in Vancouver, Business of Design Week in HK, Design for Asia Awards (HK), Spikes Awards (Singapore), Pioneer Design Awards (China), Design for Change Awards, VMRD Retail Awards, PrintWeek Awards etc, co-founders of Elephant have played a key role in building Association of Designers of India. As Vice President of Association of Designers of India, Ashish is actively involved in supporting and promoting design as a profession and in convening Pune Design Festival for eight consecutive season since 2006. The Ministry of Industry & Commerce, Government of India invited Ashish as honorary member of India Design Council and of CII National Committee on Design. Ashish was awarded certification in Good Design Awards system from Japan as part of cooperative initiative between Japan Institute of Design promotion & India Design Council. He has been on the jury of India Design Mark since its inception in 2011.
Check out - itsmytake.com
Sakal Media Group launches an innovation in user-generated content on digital media. The initiative is aimed at empowering citizens of Maharashtra to voice their opinions & expectations from the winning Lok Sabha candidate through cool personalized infographics!
Itsmytake.com is a web based initiative that encourages users to express their take on elections, candidates & performance expectations. Through three simple steps, users can publish their take on their social media & in turn can invite their circles to do the same.
Elephant, India’s pioneering strategic design consultancy has conceptualized this idea that instantly generates visually delightful & easy to understand infographics from the data selection of users. “
This is an exciting co-creation between design, technology & content experts; a first of its kind, completely conceptualized with user-focus in mind.” said Ashwini Deshpande, Co-founder Director, Elephant Design. This benchmarking initiative is powered by Persistent Systems, a global company specializing in software product and technology services.
itsmytake is a bilingual site with options for English & Marathi and has desktop as well as mobile versions for easy access. Speaking about the initiative, Anand Deshpande, CMD & CEO, Perdsistent Systems said, ““Persistent has always contributed to initiatives that make innovative use of technology to strategically transform organizations and processes and ItsMyTake.com is another example. This website can serve as a bridge between the elected representatives and the electorate. I am sure that the website is going to have a big impact”. www.itsmytake.com
New Woman - Elephant Trends Watch 2014
Read at http://issuu.com/ashwinielephant/docs/elephant_trendswatch_2014.
Elephant is celebrating 25 years of being a pioneering strategic design consultancy of India. As leading multi-disciplinary experts on emerging markets, our teams based out of Pune, Delhi & Singapore get to work in variety of domains including FMCG, Healthcare, Banking, Energy, Automobile & Lifestyle products. No matter what the domain, our approach is always user-centric and always starts with design research. We observe, meet and farm life-stories with users and turn our understanding into insights that lead to innovative design solutions. Usually, rich insights lead to two significant sets. The first set gives an overview of shifting mindsets, transitions, beliefs and emerging aspirations. This typically can be called Trends-Watch. The other set comes out of analyzing the observed trends along with visualization of future. This is called Trends Forecast.
We believe our insight-led work has reflected positively on the users. But we want to share the benefits of these insights with more users, marketers, brand owners as well as students of design & branding. So we decided to publish what we learnt in the last year and make it an open source by publishing Elephant Trends Watch 2014 online.
Impact with Food
Elephant contributed to this award winning Design Impact project with a couple of workshops at the early stage and created visually appealing and cost effective packaging for the laddoos once the recipes were finalised. Pro bono of course http://worlddesignimpact.org/projects/project2013/18/
Gold Trophy for Elephant
VMRD Best Specialty Restaurant Design, Gold Trophy awarded to Elephant for its work for Krustys at a glittering award ceremony in Mumbai today! Three cheers — with Rohhan Joshi, Vinay Dhavalaey, Ravi Kabara, Vidhiya Joshi, Meenakshi Borgohain B, Apurva Sonawane, Ankita Shrivastava, Vidya Gore, Elodie Nerot, Gerry Rebello, Ashish Deshpande and Partho Guha.
Color & Money
Color has a deep relation with the economic state of the people. General understanding is people with less money prefer strong & multicolor and rich people go for muted and soft color.
That may be simplifying things too much. The driver like youth, background, education, peer, context make the decision complex and subtle.
With greater access to media & self expression the color is becoming more personal and not about the segment.
Tiger partners with Elephant for GROWTH Story!
Britannia, one of India's most trusted brands has launched new Tiger Glucose & Creams range of biscuits with a strong proposition of growth nutrients. Elephant Design has conceptualized and designed the new brand identity and packaging.
“When redesigning a large popular brand like Tiger, one has to layer the packaging communication in a way that announces the new story delightfully, and yet does not alienate existing consumers.” says Ashwini Deshpande, Founder Director, Elephant.
Elephant has managed to do a fresh take on “growth promise” through a mnemonic and dynamic arrow that clearly connotes visible growth.
For a brighter and smarter appeal, Elephant team fine-tuned the Tiger palette of red, blue & white. The product promise of 25% Daily Growth Nutrients was picked up and amplified on the pack through a mnemonic that was supported by RTBs of Iron, Calcium, Folic Acid and Vitamin A & D. The brand identity has been revamped to look cleaner and contemporary with 3D white letters encased in blue. Since Glucose biscuit is a well-known product format, it is showcased on the pack only to retain the familiarity. However, for Tiger Creams, product shots are used as an opportunity to appeal to kids with taste & fun quotient.
Talking about the design strategy, Mayuri Nikumbh, Principal of Packaging Design practice at Elephant said, “We tried to probe what mothers look for when they are making important everyday decisions towards growth of their children. Our insight led us to communicate the fact that a simple Glucose biscuit could actually play such a positive role in GROWTH and with proper choice, one could derive significant benefit for a growing child. ”
Anuradha Narasimhan, Category Director (health and wellness), Britannia said about the Tiger relaunch " It was a challenging brief that we gave our design agency. To bring in credentials and nutrition to a brand design that used to stand for fun and energy, while maintaining continuity and recognition. I am delighted that Elephant Design brought in the GROWTH story with the right confidence and credentials and managed to carry it through the entire portfolio of Tiger Glucose, Krunch and Creams. I am sure the brand will come together and stand out in a crowded retail space". Britannia has partnered with Elephant since 2006 as its primary packaging design agency for brands like NutriChoice, Marie Gold, Treat, Tiger, Bourbon, Pure Magic, 50-50, TimePass, breads, cakes dahi & flavored yogurt.
Gluco-Vita - Challenger Brand
Creating a challenger brand is a tight rope walk, the brand needs to belong and yet stand out strongly.
This was a great exercise which made considerable difference in closing the gap with the undisputed leader and shaken up the category.
CEAT - Mascot
Creating a mascot for a company is like giving face to a idea...the perception of a company from its customer's eye. Mostly it has a longer life than a add campaign and over time has a deep impact on companies perception.
It needs strategic clarity and great visual expression.
Asian paint, care centre identity
Corporate branding, sales initiative, education and exhibition when gets mixed up...and it creates interesting results.
There is more to innovative sales channels, beyond net and apps.
Our Daily Bread
Challenge of Renewing A Popular Brand
Re positioning of a well known brand which existed over many many years is a tricky path. The key is the balance, not too far or it will loose the connect, not too near or it will be un noticed, focus on the new users but done go away from the old...But when it works it is great.
Lacto-calamine did a great sale after the new pack designs done by Elephant team, even without any add spends.
Designing A Challenger Brand
New non-stick Kitchen Ware
To create a category differentiation we up graded few materials, added few new features and finally made big perceptible difference.
Change few to make big difference.
BharatBenz Brand Identity
Design for Cricket
Design for sports has its own spacial rules, some time they are more stringent than the rule of the game.
Elephant team is been into sports branding and creating look and feel for large national & international games for sometime.